Recap: ‘Fringe’ – ‘6955 kHZ’

Back in my former life, I wrote about “Lost” a lot. A whole lot. A lot more than I care to think about at this point, not because I regret it but because it seems insanely ludicrous when judged from a relatively safe distance. In that time, I came up with a theory about all pieces of pop culture from J.J. Abrams. Maybe it”s less of a theory than an observation, if I”m being accurate. That theory? Each separate show or film with Abrams” involvement belongs to a coherent, singular, fictional world. I chose to call that world “Earth JJ.” And tonight”s episode of “Fringe” was, in a lot of ways, a love letter to that world.

[Recap of Thursday’s (Nov. 11) “Fringe” after the break…]

“6955 kHz” played with all of the tropes that have made Abrams” previous efforts so successful in the eyes of so many. Abrams loves mysterious boxes, as evidenced by this speech he gave at TED a few years back. He loves numbers, as evidenced by Page 47 from “Alias” and The Numbers from “Lost.” What makes Earth-JJ so fascinating is not simply the interconnectedness of his various worlds under the same sky. Having Ethan Hunt pass by Paik Heavy Industries in “Mission: Impossible” and seeing the DHARMA logo in the movie “Cloverfield” are amusing as Easter eggs, but don”t get to the heart of what makes Earth-JJ so special.

Even though Abrams himself didn”t have a direct hand in this episode, his joy of asking questions and contemplating the answers to them filled this week”s episode, and by proxy illuminates the central conflict of Season 3. “Fringe” started out as “Science Gone Mad,” but has shown periodically that the spark of inspiration that leads so many people in this world down incredibly dangerous paths starts off from the same place as the creative spark in telling stories. A simple question–”What if?”–starts both parties down the rabbit hole. It makes people attempt the impossible in a lab. It makes them put pen to paper. It drives them to chat rooms to unlock a seemingly unbreakable code.

The notion of Walternate”s Doomsday Device being part of some “ancient” technology didn”t sit particularly well with me at the time that it was unleashed. So much was going on at the end of Season 2 that I chalked it up to an old wives” tale Over There and moved on. But tonight, we learned that Walternate”s Device stems from recreation, not merely inspiration. That makes sense on a meta level as well as a narrative one, inasmuch as the manuscript that describes such a device looks a hell of a lot like Page 47 from Rimbaldi”s manuscript. Just as Walternate digs into the past of his world, so too do the writers of “Fringe” dig into the past of Earth-JJ.

This device, dubbed a “vacuum,” is itself at the heart of the duality inherent in the struggle between the two universes. It contains the capacity for both creation AND destruction, which implies that machines are neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. (Is THAT what Heiner Muller meant when he wrote the play “Hamletmachine”?) The preservation of one world seems to imply the destruction of the other, according to most people on both sides in the world of “Fringe.” The notable exception? Peter, who envisions a third way. Makes sense: he”s singularly able to see both sides, with an equal stake in the survival of each, unable to choose even under the most strenuous of scenarios.

That optimism lies at the heart of so many things in this show, scientific inquiry itself at the forefront. One of the best scenes of tonight”s episode didn”t involve anything more than Nina Sharp and Walter sitting on a bench on Harvard”s campus, mulling over the lack of serious inquiry in the students before them. Walter and Nina have both suffered for the former”s bullheaded approach to finding answers all those decades before, but “Fringe” has shown time and again how it”s not necessarily the instincts that are incorrect so much as the application/implementation of them.

It”s also shown how much emotion trumps intellect: for much of the episode, Walter is colder than Walternate, furious at Peter”s attempts to assemble the Doomsday Device. He sees only pain at the end of that road, but Peter doesn”t see things having to end that way. His optimism is based in scientific curiosity, one that doesn”t have a specific hypothesis so much as a cautious hope that a device that can respond to him can also be manipulated by him to produce something other than a cataclysmic result. So much of “Fringe” has concerned two sides each warring against what they feel is the enemy. In Peter, they have a potential peacemaker.

So much of tonight”s episode centered around a growing sense of sympathy, if not outright empathy, with those affected in this increasingly hostile war. On one level, you have Walter”s response to those with memory loss. If anyone can understand what it”s like to live a life without a clear sense of the past, it”s him. On other level, you have Fauxlivia, increasingly ill at ease with her task Over Here, especially as the body counts start to rise and more people pick at the flaws in her cover story. On a third level, you have Astrid, who for the first time tonight truly started to resemble her Other Side self in cracking the apparently impossible-to-crack Number Station code.

As for the numbers themselves: they are themselves a type of vacuum, infused with power both to create and destroy. That the device was split apart and taken to the ends of the globe by our steampunk predecessor speaks to the device”s inherent capacity to kill. But the code itself suggests that, for those able to hear its message, it”s also a device that could potentially heal as well. The device could accelerate the damage done by Walter the night he crossed over, or it could also fully heal it.

Now, I won”t go all Mel Brooks on you and suggest that we”ll hear Alterna Broyles cry out to Walternate, “It”s the Doomsday Device, sir….it”s gone from suck to blow!” before season”s end. But it”s always encouraging when the types of questions asked by those watching the show are expressed in the show in a timely fashion. Just as we at home have noticed how both worlds are worth saving, along comes good-ol” optimistic Peter Bishop to state the same fact. After all, Earth-JJ might be a dangerous place, but it”s also a glorious one, far more interesting than our own, and filled with more than a few people that embrace it rather than shun it.

And when people like the Bishop Boys embrace it, beautiful things can happen.

A few notes about tonight”s ep:

*** Having “Alias” vet Kevin Weisman as a shapeshifter didn”t hurt the whole Earth-JJ thing. Now, if Fauxlivia chopped all her hair off, then we could have really had something going on here.

*** Just like Jack Shephard, Peter Bishop had to go back tonight. Course, Peter only went back for skim milk as opposed to…well, you know.

*** I”m glad to know that U2 is popular in both universes, though I can”t help but wonder if Over There U2 would have attempted the ironic PopMart tour.

*** I will confess I”m slightly confused how Walternate started building his own device based on a radio signal from over here. He has blueprints of the device, but not all the pieces. Some, like “The Box” from a few weeks ago, are over here. But I don”t remember the Doomsday Device looking like it was missing nearly forty pieces, the approximate number of locations buried in the Numbers Station code. Maybe from Over There he could hear the signal but needed Peter to assemble it, and thus sent over the shapeshifter along with Fauxlivia. The “Lost” guy in me is getting an itch to figure this all out, but I don”t want to turn into Ed Bancroft from “Rubicon.”

What did you make of tonight”s episode? Too much of the old, or a nice trip down memory lane? Did you like the expansion of the mythology, or did it border on silliness? Leave your thoughts below!

Around The Web

Join The Discussion: Log In With

Horrifically dull attention to detail alert: U2 doesn’t exist in the other universe. In the episode where Fauxlivia is getting brought up to speed by her main contact (lack of attention to detail: I can’t remember his name!) who wound up oozing his brains out in prison, she’s scanning through a kind of pop culture primer for our Earth, and she specifically stops on a picture of Bono, mispronounces the name, etc.

By: Misterpuff

11.12.2010 @ 8:17 AM

Yeah didn’t she call him BO no.

Did like that when they started transcribingthe Numbers most were The Numbers 8,15,42 with the odd 7 thrown in there. So on Earth-JJ The Numbers did have signicance to the first Ones, and perhaps the Islands particular set refer to the Island and The Mighty Island Cork is a peice of the machine or the power pack? Wadda ya think, Ryan?

By: Ed W

11.12.2010 @ 9:51 AM

Nice touch with them having her look befuddled when he looked away after giving her the tickets. She played along but then it became clear she hadn’t heard of U2.

I liked the episode as I was watching it, all the production aspects were top notch, but it didn’t sit well in my head later. I don’t much like the idea of this first people thing – it’s both too odd and too quickly accepted by Peter. But it’s hard to nitpick that when I’m satisfied by everything like the cinematography and such.

I’m wondering how she is functioning in our world without much familiarity with pens, I guess she’s been lucky so far. Maybe Peter or Walter will ask her to write something down and she can’t.

By: Aaron

11.12.2010 @ 11:54 AM

Foreshowadowing alert!

The author of the First People book, “Seamus Wiles,” is an anagram… for SAMUEL WEISS.

Sam Weiss is the bowling alley guy played by Kevin Corrigan last year, who was most recently mentioned on the blackboard in Walternate’s lab in the S2 finale – A DEMON TWISTS RUST (Don’t Trust Sam Weiss).

By: Olddarth

11.12.2010 @ 1:27 PM

Great writeup Ryan. This episode set up the empathy for both sides that I hoped this season would be all about.

Really enjoying this season.

By: DougMac

11.12.2010 @ 2:10 PM

Me and the wife are big JJ?BAd Robot fans from Felicity to Alias to Lost and Fringe and we often joke about how they should all be connected too. I so wanted Dharma to a division of SD-6 and have Chang and Widmore working for/with Sloane.
This was a great Fringe episode tonight. It was nice to see Nina start putting the Fauxlivia thing together, I think they uderuse her a lot.

By: mcklowry

11.12.2010 @ 3:09 PM

Re: your last bullet, given that the other universe is technologically ahead of our own, my guess is that the number stations were cracked much earlier and their universe’s vacuum was found a while ago. Walternate must have determined or banked on the fact that our universe had a similar group of people. The question now is Peter’s role. Did this people believe someday he would use the device to destroy a universe?

By: westsydegal

11.12.2010 @ 3:28 PM

Write a comment…

By: westsydegal

11.12.2010 @ 3:33 PM

whoops, let me try this again…

I very much enjoyed this episode. As soon as I saw the lady type “15, 8 42…” into the screen, I think I yelled out in excitement! It took me back to when we as Lost fans discovered the mysterious numbers also being broadcast over a strange signal, discovered later from a control tower on the island. And the ‘First People’ references harken back to the original Others from ancient times, even way before the times Jacob, MIB/Smokie, and their mom’s existence on the island. The first people’s technology/dooms day device definitely takes me back to Frozen Donkey wheel, and the mystery of how it came to be. Great episode!!

By: gagglefinish

11.12.2010 @ 3:54 PM

What is the objects were teleported from the other universe and had to be done underground so as to absorb the energy by the black convex sphere from season 1?

By: Nick

11.12.2010 @ 7:38 PM

I was thinking that the first people are maybe some version of the watcher’s (if not the watcher’s themselves). Did anyone see them?

By: jimbo

11.12.2010 @ 8:41 PM

i think both universes had the numbers, walternate had just managed to crack it erlier, finding the pieces to the vacuum, and found the device needs to be activated in both universe at the same time in order to work, hence phase one of ‘plan’. now onto phase two….

By: Sophisticaz

11.13.2010 @ 12:53 AM

Whilst Chuck turned out to be sub-par this season, Sons is less impressive than its first two seasons, Fringe has considerably upped its game, and I have to say it really seems to have learned from the mistakes Lost made. This is by far my favourite show right now. By. Far.

Regarding rebuilding the vacuum, it’s possible that the first people in both worlds made different decisions with the parts and Over There either have an incomplete log or maybe their First People destroyed some of the pieces.

It’s so cool that “First Peoples” appears in the Over There opening credits.

By: Ed W

11.13.2010 @ 1:19 AM

I think the first people concept is a ruse by Walternate to give Peter access to the whole device. Walternate is probably behind Sam Weiss who is behind the First People book, an elaborate plan to destroy Peter’s world with him helping it happen. Peter is being awfully gullible this season.

By: Sophisticaz

11.13.2010 @ 1:39 PM

Reply to comment…

By: Sophisticaz

11.13.2010 @ 1:42 PM

Ok, that didn’t work.

I was going to say: don’t forget that it was Nina that introduced Olivia to Sam, saying that he helped when she lost her arm. Not saying that negates your theory but just a detail worth remembering. Especially since we know Sam enjoys word jumbles.

By: Ed W

11.13.2010 @ 11:18 PM

You are probably right. I’m just resistant to the First People idea and hoping that isn’t “real” in the world of the show. It would basically mean evolution isn’t real and possibly involve aliens – not sure I want the show to go there.

Still, on the positive side, I really can’t believe how much this series has improved.

By: Matt Cafaro

11.13.2010 @ 1:34 AM

Couple of things:

The First People are obviously The Observers. I think we can all agree to that fact. They gave Walter the page with the machine and Peter’s face with the eye beams, and the box the piece of the Vacuum was in had their alphabet on it.

Fauxlivia doesn’t know U2, and didn’t know Bono (or Bo-No as she first pronounced his name) until episode one of this season.

The Vacuum is NOT fully assembled on The Other Side. Or at least, I don’t think it is. That’s why Walternate needs the other parts of it assembled on this side, so he can come over and steal it.

Here’s what I’m thinking: The First People used the machine, and the machine is what cracked the universes in two, creating just two parallel universes, and not the multiverse we’ve been thinking. That is the cataclysm from the book. The Vacuum created two universes, but in doing so, it destroyed the first universe.

It makes sense: you cannot have creating without destruction, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

So The First People lived on Earth 150 million years ago or whatever. The harnessed the power of creation, and in using it, they cracked their reality in two, resetting the evolutionary clock, and destroyed everything that came before.

But some of these people lived on, and they are The Observers, a by-product of The Vacuum (like mutants are a by-product of Nuclear war in Omega Man or whatever). The Vacuum made them immortal and all-powerful, but decimated their civilization, so they atone by watching and making sure the Second People (us) don’t make the same mistake.

I’m probably way wrong… but I also figured out that First Earth in BSG wasn’t our Earth pretty early.

By: Lori

11.14.2010 @ 11:18 PM

I thought for sure Bolivia wasn’t going to remember the numbers when Peter asked her to recite them while they were in the car. Didn’t Olivia once say she had a thing for numbers? She could hear them once and remember them forever?

By: Jen

11.17.2010 @ 11:13 PM

Yes, and she has a photographic memory in general. It felt similar to Ourlivia trying to make that impossible shot earlier in the season. Fauxlivia is the gold medal- winnng marksman, but ourlivia managed to do it. It makes me wonder. At the time I thought it was the memories taking over, but maybe the two are just more similar than they realized, and each developed her talents differently due to the differing trajectories of their lives.